Covering the Streets with Art

The boarded up businesses of Hayes Valley continue to flower with popup murals...

...including these adjoining avian headshots at the Topiary Salon by Inkletterman...

...entitled El Sol La Pink and Midnight Mohawk respectively.

At the triangular plaza bound by Market, Larkin, and Hayes Streets, the pavement has become a large, bright mural...

...of rounded shapes radiating from a circular vent.

The paint job on the vent was rather slipshod...

...but any counter to the overall greyness of the wind tunnel plaza is welcome.

Meanwhile, on a walk downtown along Geary Boulevard, we encountered for the first time the extraordinary, multi-story Figurines by the anonymous graffiti artist BiP which went up in 2017.

Wikipedia's introduction follows: "BiP (Believe in People) is an anonymous street painter who is identified, from clues released on Twitter and by his intermediaries, to be a male Princeton graduate, former investment banker, and current artist." He's been creating huge murals around the Bay Area and around the globe for the last half decade, but according to an article at SF Weekly by Grace Z. Li, he's retiring the name and the brand after receiving serious security threats (click here for the article).

The reason for those threats, the day after an idiotic SF Chronicle reporter printed the artist's work address, was the above mural, Baby with a Handgun. Unveiled in November 2019 above a parking lot at the corner of Oak and Franklin Streets, it's simultaneously simple and complex, beautiful and disturbing. It also feels like a prescient public masterpiece months before the country exploded over the George Floyd murder.